Bloodkin (Jaseth of Jaelshead) Read online

  “She was not a prostitute!” he replied hotly to Lolitha’s ribbing.

  Outside, our breath made little puffs in the air and the stars shone down coldly. The streets were full of laughing groups, making their way between parties or stumbling home after imbibing too much.

  We made our way back to the Hall slowly, and our group spread out a bit on the rather long walk. Richard and James zoomed up the front, giving their Bloodkin piggy-back rides, hooting with laughter.

  Lolitha and I brought up the rear. “Oh bollocks, hold on a second, Jas.” She grabbed my shoulder to steady herself as she pulled off one of her shoes to fish out a stone that had become caught.

  “Hey, um, thanks for this afternoon eh,” she told me.

  “Ha, not a problem ‘Litha. Charlie told me once how to handle girls who were, um…”

  “Crazy?”

  I laughed, “Yeah, a bit crazy.”

  She laughed with me, relaxed now as we resumed our walk.

  Suddenly, out of an alleyway, two men stepped in front of us. I thought it was a bit odd, but Lolitha, presumably accustomed to unwanted male attention, simply held her head high and tried to walk past them.

  “These them?” I heard one of the men mutter to the other as we drew up.

  “Yep.” Then they jumped on us, covering our mouths and pulling us back into the alley. None of the rest of our group up ahead noticed and I tried to call out, but the man who grabbed me stuffed a filthy rag into my mouth before I could make a noise.

  Lolitha was struggling in the grips of the other man and managed to get in a good kick to his bollocks. He yelped, but still held her firmly, pushing her further away from the main street.

  In the darkness in the back of the alley I could barely make out what they were doing. The one that held Lolitha grabbed a fistful of her hair and forced her head back.

  “Dirty little Lilbitch,” he muttered, his voice dripping with spite and fury, and he slapped her hard around the face with the back of his hand.

  I was truly shocked. Not just because this scum had backhanded my friend like she was some common whore, but Lilbitch was a curse that had the dubious distinction of being both misogynistic and sacrilegious, and was never, ever, spoken in polite company. Which clearly this was not.

  I thought they were going to rob us, but the thug holding me twisted my arms up behind me and forced me down onto my knees.

  “So she’ll do?” he asked the one holding Lolitha, who was still struggling in vain.

  “Yeah, looks like it.”

  “What about this one?” I realised he meant me.

  “He’s too fair. You’d be able to tell.”

  “So what should I do with him?”

  “Ow, khunst!” Lolitha had managed to get an elbow into her assailant’s windpipe. He jerked her head with his handful of her hair and she dropped down to her knees as well, gurgling in pain. “I dunno. Kill him I suppose.”

  Oh shit. Oh holy shit. This was not a robbery. This was… Oh shit!

  The guy behind me had pulled out a long hunting knife, wickedly sharp, and I could see it gleaming faintly out of the corner of my eye.

  The man holding Lolitha bent his head to hers and she snarled at him.

  “Say goodbye to your friend, girly.”

  The man with the knife held it up to my throat. I was going to die. Just like that. Sweet Lilbecz. I was going to die. I closed my eyes as I felt him tense to draw it across my throat.

  Then.

  Nothing.

  I was dead, clearly. There was no pain. No nothing. I couldn’t feel the man or the knife against my throat anymore. I was dead and this was some kind of afterlife.

  Then I heard the sound of someone being sick and I realised I could open my eyes. The two men were lying in heaps on the ground and Lolitha was throwing up against the wall, one hand out to steady herself.

  I spat the rag out of my mouth and tried to breathe. Apparently I wasn’t dead. But if I wasn’t dead why was it so hard to get air into my lungs? I sucked furiously, trying to get some oxygen past my constricted throat.

  “Oh Jaseth, look! I threw up all my dinner!” Lolitha called out, sounding a bit giddy. “Oh, Jas, look.” I was still on my knees, my head down, and I thought she was still talking about vomit. “You were invisible.”

  That was weird. I looked up to where Lolitha was pointing, and there was another figure, dark against the exit to the alley.

  “You two alright?” she asked. Hmmm, voice was familiar, but I couldn’t breathe, let alone think—

  “Anna?”

  The figure stepped forward and pushed back her hood. It was Anna. What the hell?

  “You… You killed them?” Lolitha gasped out, still propped against the wall.

  Anna nodded. “Aneurisms.”

  “Oh. Oh ho ho, that’s… That’s very impressive. Ha,” Lolitha had started giggling and pushed off from the wall, tottering over. “Oh ha ha, oh Jas, we got rescued. And, oh my, ha ha, we got rescued by Lya Myn! We got rescued by Lya Vassalion!”

  “Lolitha!” I warned her feebly. How did she know?

  She waved at the air and almost stumbled. “Ha ha, it’s not like it’s hard to tell! With all the, ha ha, bodyguards.” She swung around wildly and pointed at me. “And you! Your Mentor’s in love with Lya Myn! Ha ha ha!”

  I groaned and tried to stand on wobbly legs. This really was too much. Lolitha’s stumbling had brought her right up to Anna who was watching, violet eyes inscrutable.

  “That invisibility thing was brilliant. Do you think you could teach me?” She grasped at Anna’s sleeve, swaying wildly. “Oh Anna, you’re so pretty—” Anna caught her easily as she fainted dead away.

  “Uh, hi Anna.” I had managed to walk the few steps to where she was holding Lolitha upright. “Um, what the hell was that?”

  “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner, Jaseth.”

  “But, but, those men…”

  She smiled thinly. “I have had my eye on them for some time. It’s personal.”

  “Gosh.” I couldn’t really think of anything else to say.

  “Will you be alright with her?” Anna indicated the unconscious Lolitha and I nodded, speechless. Anna transferred Lolitha to me, and I slung one of her arms around my shoulder. “Good, get back to the others now. And no lagging behind, you hear? Oh, and Jaseth? We will keep this incident quiet, yes?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Good.” She nodded and stepped back into the shadows, then was simply not there any more. Sweet holy Lilbecz. Seriously.

  “’Litha? Wake up!” I tapped her on the face and she stirred. “Come on, can you walk? Let’s start walking.” I half dragged her out of the alley back onto the street.

  “Oof, shit Jas, what just… Oh gawd.”

  I was too shaken to even reply. Lolitha started to move her legs by herself, but she still leaned heavily on me.

  “Oh shit, I told Anna she was pretty.” Seriously, I had almost been murdered and that was what she was worried about. “Fyar khanall, Jas, you almost got murdered.” I could hear the catch in her voice. Then she gave a little gasp that could have been a sob. “Murdered!” Then she giggled. Oh bollocks, she was hysterical.

  “Yep, I almost got murdered.” Oh no, I could feel it coming.

  “By two thugs, in a—” Another gasp. “In a dark alleyway!”

  “Yep. Almost got murdered in a dark alleyway.” Shit. I couldn’t help it. I giggled too. It was almost too ridiculous to be true.

  “Murdered. In a dark alleyway,” she repeated, and then couldn’t hold it in any longer. “What an effing loser!” She collapsed in hysterical laughter and I had to hold her up.

  “And we were rescued, ha ha, by Lya Myn herself!” I couldn’t stop now, I was giggling madly.

  “And she was invisible, ha ha!”

  “And she used magic!” We shrieked with laughter.

  “What are you two giggling about?” Telgeth asked us grumpily as we found the rest of our group wai
ting at the next intersection.

  “We thought we had lost you!” called Charlie.

  Lolitha managed to calm herself for a moment, and nodded seriously. “You almost did.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and that was it, we were off, cackling like mad people all the way back to the Hall.

  he next day was the first of November, and with November came the rains. Two things of interest happened that month. The first was my birthday.

  The day after Samhain, as promised, Fiona came to teach the class about moss. I was nursing a hangover and a decent case of post-traumatic stress and I found it difficult to concentrate on her lecture about the cultivation and life-cycle of moss. Fiona looked at Lolitha and me curiously as we struggled through the quiz she set us, but let us join the others on the couches at the back of the class to sample some White. Instead of using a pipe, Fiona had brought along a rather curious contraption she called a vapourette that heated moss to the point of releasing the active chemicals, but not to the point of combustion that actually produced smoke. She had been working on it for the Human population so they could use moss the way Nea’thi did, who could spark it with Hầұeӣ. And seeing as our interest in the moss was purely academic, it was an ideal way to try some of the different strains she had brought with her.

  For the next week and a half, Fiona entertained the class with her history of the use of moss. Its psychoactive properties were realised by the Nea’thi not long after they had moved down to the Enclaves, although originally the moss was brewed with boiling water into a tea, or simply eaten. The earliest strain, or ‘wild moss’, was rudimentary. It alleviated chronic nausea, which was the primary reason the Nea’thi began to smoke it, as opposed to simply ingesting it, but it produced a rather dizzying high and left a hangover that lasted for hours. The earliest horticulturalists tried to improve on this with selective breeding, and later, with genetic tweaking with Hầұeӣ. By the time of the Leaving, six separate varieties were in cultivation, with many different strains of each ‘colour’. The newest variation, the Green, was engineered after the Leaving as Nea’thi going Outside discovered the joys – and pains – of drinking alcohol.

  “What? So there’s no booze in the Enclaves?” Telgeth demanded to know.

  “Oh, well, there is now. All imported from Outside, so it’s rather expensive. I suppose we didn’t really have much in the way of things to ferment, what with living Underground and all,” Fiona mused. “And we had moss to entertain ourselves while relaxing. So of course, Journeymen leaving the Enclaves for the first time have often never drunk alcohol before and tend to get a bit silly…” She grinned at the Mentors, who chuckled with her at the evident foolishness of Journeymen. “Therefore the Green was developed, so it can be smoked before drinking. It stimulates the particular metabolic processes that deal with alcohol, and it alleviates most of the more… unpleasant effects of drinking.”

  In the afternoons we sampled different strains of each variety – save the Purple (“this is going to be an academic study, not an orgy!”) and the Black. Fiona had us write up experiment tables for each, noting the history of each strain: who it was developed by, and where, and why. Some individual strains had been in cultivation for thousands of years, and were the pride of the particular Enclave they were from, and she got us to write down their proper names in Nea’thi as well as what they were called by horticulturalists operating Outside. We had to note the different flavours of each, and I was pretty amazed to find that there was as much variety and subtlety between each strain of moss as there was between different varietals of wine. Lastly, she required us to think carefully about the different physical and mental effects each strain produced in us. At the end of each session she would go around the group and ask us to give a little speech about our favourite out of the strains we had sampled, forcing us to think critically – which could be difficult, depending on the variety that was the subject of the day. Fiona spoke only briefly about the Black, telling us that she would be back to give us more thorough instruction when the time came for us to take it. Charlie’s story about Joey had honestly made me feel more than a bit apprehensive about when we would have to use the Black. It was highly, dangerously psychoactive, and should only be used under the closest supervision, but its use led to a whole new depth of understanding and control of one’s Hầұeӣ – in a way that even months of meditation couldn’t achieve.

  The Friday of the week after Samhain was my nineteenth birthday. After our meditation in the morning, Fiona brightly wished me a happy birthday and announced that we were to spend the day on a field trip. With our Mentors in tow we left the Academy and wandered through the Quarter to Fiona’s shop. To my surprise, Anna was tending the front counter. Two of her guards were seated in the front, pretending to be customers. She gave us a brief smile as we filed in, shrugging at the unspoken question in Charlie’s upraised eyebrows.

  “Just helping out a friend. It’s the least I can do.”

  Though most of us had visited the shop at one point or another since arriving in Lille, Fiona took the time to point out the baskets that held the different strains of each variety, and she allowed us, using our notes, to use her grinder to make our own blends. Mine was mostly the strain called White Cloud – a sweet, fruity White that I had noted left me feeling slightly hungry, but gave me a clarity of mind that I appreciated, especially when practising some of the harder Hầұeӣ exercises. I added a pinch of White Pony, a strain that was slightly musky and spicy and gave a wee kick of energy, and two pinches of White Silence, a strain that tasted remarkably like a good Jaelshead Riesling and did wonders for headaches. Fiona sampled a taste of my blend in her vapourette and pronounced it excellent. She added a sprinkling of White Clover – a sweet, honeyed White – ground it again, then offered me a taste, and I could see the extra sweetness and honey flavour improved my blend remarkably. She bagged up our blends for us as a reward for being “such clever Bloodkin”, led us through the door behind the counter to the back of the shop. It was a great, kitchen-like room, full of ovens and drying racks and scales. There was a door to a store cupboard that was tightly padlocked.

  “That’s where I keep the Black,” Fiona told us. “Don’t even think about it!” I gulped, I knew the reason for the extra security and it made me decidedly uncomfortable.

  She pointed out the ovens and stoves, explaining about her experiments with distilling moss into butter, and baking with it. Then she led us through another door and down a long flight of stairs into the basement. And what a basement it was.

  Brightly lit with glowbes hung from the ceiling and recessed into the walls, the whole room was set up with long rows of hydroponic gear. Great pipes had been sawn in half and held water that had been pumped in from the lake and augmented with a mixture of fertilisers that Fiona had added. On top of this water, in various stages of maturity, grew the moss. Each pipe had a different strain, carefully labelled. Fiona went briefly over the life-cycle of the moss, pointing out examples of each stage. She had a strain of Blue that was ready for harvest and demonstrated how you scraped it out of the pipe in sheets and laid it out on a drying rack to mature. Then it was back upstairs to hang the rack, so air could circulate freely.

  After the morning’s activities and sampling my blend, I was starving, but Fiona had anticipated this. She had us sit in the front of her shop, then brought us a selection of her baked moss-infused foods. I suspected that she was using us as kind of taste-testers for her trials, but we certainly didn’t mind. I munched my way through tiny meat pies with moss-butter pastry (not bad), bacon and cheese pinwheels (which were actually not great, the flavour of the moss was too sweet and overpowering. I told Fiona this and she thanked me, jotting something down in a notebook she produced from a fold of her voluminous dress), a thin chocolate brownie (delicious and a distinct improvement on the last batch I had tried) and a strawberry shortcake (also delicious).

  When we had finished Fiona grinned wickedly at me. “I hope you like c
arrot cake, Jaseth.” And she disappeared out the back of the shop, then reappeared carrying a huge, frosted cake with nineteen candles burning on the top.

  Sweet Lilbecz, how embarrassing. I hadn’t had candles on a cake since I was about five. Everyone sang Happy Birthday to me as I felt myself blushing furiously, and I tried to blow out my candles without spitting on the icing too much.

  When everyone had eaten a slice and declared it marvellous, Fiona trundled the plate, littered with crumbs, back to the kitchen. She then gave us a talk on pipe selection. The vapourette we had been using was a prototype, though Fiona assured us that she was securing the use of a smith to construct some for sale soon, although they would be expensive. I had assumed that choosing a pipe was all about aesthetic taste, but this was not so. The length of the mouthpiece was important – long ones gave a smoother, cleaner flavour and were aimed at the moss connoisseur, while short mouthpieces gave a more intense and complete experience, perfect for poor students with a limited moss budget. Material was also important, and the best one depended on how you lit the moss. Hard woods were good for Hầұeӣ and metals were designed for use with matches or sparklights, while glass was good for both but were easily broken by the clumsy.

  It was still only early afternoon, but Fiona let us leave after that. “I hear there are some celebrations planned for this evening.” She gave Charlie a meaningful glance, but he just blandly shrugged his shoulders at my questioning look.

  Back at the Hall a package was waiting for me in my room. It was full of birthday gifts from my parents. I sat on the couch and unwrapped it carefully. There was a note from my mother, wishing me a happy birthday and hoping that my studies were going well, with an implied hint that I should write to her more often. I felt a bit bad, I had only scribbled off a couple of letters home since I had been in Lille, assuring them that I was fine and learning lots, but to be fair, I hadn’t really put much effort in.

  Inside the parcel were two pairs of long johns and long-sleeved vests in the finest alpaca knit. There was a gorgeous pair of black gloves, finely tooled in the softest leather, lined with more alpaca. Carefully wrapped at the bottom of the package was a beautiful small belt-knife with a delicately etched hilt and scabbard, decorated with the Jaelshead crest. When I eased it out of its scabbard it shone like the moon on water and was so sharp that it cut my finger when I pressed it to the blade.